In the years that have passed since the early 2010s and where we are now – the 2020s, the atmosphere surrounding Charlotte’s Pride weekend in August and the national celebration month of June has felt very much like a party of sorts, from the parades and food vendors to the smiling faces and dancers with rainbow fans, drag and musical performances, and the crowd we’ve grown to love. In Charlotte’s community, it’s a festive type of mood that sprawls from one end of North Tryon to the other for an entire weekend, with accompanying events at venues around the city throughout August. ***
This isn’t an isolated type of view just in our city, of course. From June to November, Rock Hill to Raleigh, around the Carolinas there is one happening after the next, and it’s all about celebrating our communities and ourselves. Those are great things to be able to do, and we need that release from the belittling and erasure we see coming from the current administration.
But that wasn’t what Pride marches were about in the beginning. Pride events dating back to the 1970s and 1980s were a very different animal – one that was about fighting for our rights and showing the rest of our country we deserved respect, rights and acceptance.
The choice of June for Pride month comes not only from the Stonewall uprising, but from the marches that came after that pivotal event. A year after Stonewall, on June 28, 1970, major marches in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles took place, drawing thousands of LGBTQ+ individuals from around the country in an effort to both commemorate riots in 1969 and to demonstrate for equal rights.
These marches were followed for decades by many others, giving into more activism and organization, following in part the actions and traditions of the “Reminder Day Pickets” held in Philadelphia at Independence Hall from 1965 to 1969.
It was those organizers, operating under the name “Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations” (ERCHO), formed from 13 voting organizations, that in November 1969 originally suggested that they should shift focus from planning the Reminder Day Picket to organizing an annual demonstration in commemoration of Stonewall.
From the conference held that November, a resolution was made, stating, “We propose that a demonstration be held annually on the last Saturday in June in New York City to commemorate the 1969 spontaneous demonstrations on Christopher Street and this demonstration be called CHRISTOPHER STREET LIBERATION DAY.”
And, from that collection of organizations, came the Christopher Street Liberation Day Umbrella Committee (CSLDUC), whose goal was to take the protests and activism further, linking in other cities and townships across the country into one massive march, culminating into an unofficial Gay Pride Week, spanning June 22 to June 28.
That’s a good bit of the core history, so where does ours come from? According to the City of Charlotte’s government website, it wasn’t until a few decades later when those efforts made by CSLDUC finally trickled down here, though more as a possible inspiration.
Before getting to how Pride marches came to Charlotte, it is essential to know what the foundation was made from that brought them here. From spaces springing up in the late ‘60s like The Scorpio Lounge and Oleen’s, to gay-centric publications like the Charlotte Free Press (1975), Sinister Wisdom (1976) and Qnotes (you’re reading it now), which traces its roots back to 1983 when it served as the newsletter of the early LGBTQ+ action group known as Queen City Quordinators. At that time, it was a fundraising-focused organization that put together some of North Carolina’s first-ever Pride events. Charlotte’s drag scene had also gained prominence in the state, starring a collection of performers that would put on crowd-drawing events like the annual Ms. Renaissance Drag Review, starting off at the Metrolina Fairgrounds in 1978.
Timeline cornerstones like these, along with the Metrolina AIDS Project (MAP) (1985), forming out of the needs to combat and educate about the disease for Charlotteans, to artistic outlets like One Voice Chorus, all create an outward identity that the city can lean on, and mostly likely did in bringing our first large Pride marches here.
The first official NC Pride march formed in Durham in 1986. It later took on the form of a rotational event shared by North Carolina’s larger cities in 1994, when Charlotte hosted the event and expanded on the idea of the city’s own Pride. The LGBTQ+ community of the time brought in additional performance elements to combine with the activism the event was built upon. Eight years later, in 2001, Charlotte Pride would form with the same concept in mind, including entertainment as part of the festivities.
Twenty-four years later, Charlotte Pride brings in hundreds of thousands of people each year, all coming to celebrate themselves and those that identify as they do, along with allies and onlookers.
In the year that we’ve faced under Donald Trump and company’s constant attacks, it is hard not to contemplate the earlier days of our community. Can we look at our record for guidance? What is civil disobedience? How do we stage a protest driven by the need for equality and achieve results? How do we find the strength to overcome the fear?
Is just being visible, out and proud enough?
We are seeing the curtain lift over what the Trump administration, along with many conservatives, would rather have our country look like. Although our world has changed dramatically since those early days in the 1960s, some of the conservative vision has always been with us. While not on Donald Trump’s watch in 2022, his fingerprints are indelibly marked on the Supreme Court that, now right-leaning, would go on to overturn the case that gave Americans the right to abortion, Roe v. Wade.
Soon after, Justice Clarence Thomas stated an opinion about revisiting the established ruling that allowed same-sex marriage to be a right, 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges. In statements taken after Roe fell, Thomas called the concept substantive due process, a term in constitutional law that essentially allows courts to oversee what we see as rights – matters like love, intimacy and sex.
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents,” Thomas wrote, as part of the ruling overturning a woman’s right to reproductive freedom.
The present examples just from this year include multiple executive orders attacking the transgender population, dismissing them from military duty and taking away their healthcare, the erasure of DEI initiatives and removing references from historical documents that recognize the LGBTQ+ community. There are also multiple state and city governments attempting to ban Pride events and rainbow flags, based on personal religious “beliefs” and sometimes nothing more than intolerance. The list goes on for a bit, and it can be expected that there is more to come.
During Pride this year, it may be time to bend less towards the cheer and festivities, and lean more on the marches, demonstrations and protests that started the ball rolling in the first place. Presence as protest still has its place, because we all deserve to be here and be identified for who we are, but a change of pace in showing who we started out as may show a seriousness many may have forgotten about.
Revisiting our history of Pride, protests, demonstrations and political action may very well be the way to save our future.